It was at the Bauhaus in Dessau that Gunta Stölzl, one of the foremost textile designers of the twentieth century, experienced not only her greatest professional triumphs but also a devastating defeat. Rising from student to instructor to master, she became the only female faculty member of the famous institution. As such she steered the Weaving Workshop from craft to industrial design, developing it into the most successful and financially viable of all the Bauhaus workshops. After her departure, her career as an independent designer continued to encompass innovative textile design and individual works of art. Although male Bauhaus members have enjoyed fame and worldwide exhibitions too numerous to count, the achievements of this remarkable woman remained, until recently, woefully undocumented. Sixty-six years after her forced resignation in 1931 and fourteen years after her death in 1983, the Dessau Bauhaus has righted the balance. A major retrospective exhibition, a definitive catalogue, and a symposium illuminated a brilliant talent and a career that was, in many ways, representative of the struggles, achievements, and setbacks encountered by other Bauhaus women. All this occurred in 1997, marking Stölzl’s centennial.

Born in Munich, Stölzl studied decorative painting and ceramics at the local Kunstgewerbeschule and enlisted as a Red Cross nurse during the final two years of World War I. In 1919 she was among the plethora of young women attracted by Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto and its egalitarian message, its faith in the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), and Gropius’s aim to make workshops the cornerstone of Bauhaus education. The unexpectedly large number of female students and their claim to precious workshop spaces, however, prompted the Bauhaus to form a separate women’s department which, in 1920, became the Weaving Workshop.

Stölzl discovered her affinity for textiles and, in the absence of a professional instructor, quickly took charge of the workshop. She passed her journeyman’s examination in 1922, became technical director of the Dessau Weaving Workshop in 1925, and was appointed junior master in 1927. From the beginning, she distinguished herself through innovation, whether in designing one-of-a-kind hangings, using new materials, or developing industrial prototypes. Under her leadership, the Weaving Workshop thrived. Not only did it contribute significantly to the upkeep of the Bauhaus, always in a precarious financial situation, but it made “Bauhaus fabrics” synonymous with technical invention and excellence in design. Unfortunately, however, elements within the school soon echoed the growing right-wing political climate in Germany, and in 1931 internal intrigues forced Stölzl’s resignation. She went into exile in Switzerland where she continued to work as a hand-weaver and a designer for industry.

Selected and well-known examples of Stölzl’s work have, of course, been included in previous Bauhaus exhibitions. In Dessau, however, viewing the scope of her lifetime’s achievement – the sheer quality, quantity, and diversity of her work – was a revelation. By dividing the vast exhibition space into sections, a comprehensive thematic overview of Stölzl’s oeuvre emerged. Included were drawings executed before she entered the school, student work starting in 1919, and every aspect of her mature professional career. The viewer was made witness to a life devoted to the cause of excellence in design. Even her early academic and travel sketches revealed a deft hand and a very personal point of view. Among these a drawing of an old weaver and his loom seemed especially prescient. Stölzl’s confident use of color, a hallmark of all her later artwork, whether on paper or in textiles, was already evident in student projects executed in Johannes Itten’s famous Vorkurs (preliminary course). A distinct surprise was the number and quality of gouaches and watercolors, of which only a limited number were known until now. Even before the arrival of Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in 1922, Stölzl’s works on paper convey her familiarity with Modernism and her confidence in creating abstract compositions in brilliant, fluid color applications. While some compositions reflect the influence of Paul Klee, a Bauhaus master sympathetic to the textile students, her geometric designs for carpets, wall hangings, and yardage and the rich palette of her color studies are uniquely her own. Placing these works at the beginning of the exhibition introduced the viewer to the range of her talent and to the depth of her artistry, dispelling the notion of Stölzl as “merely” a weaver.

The larger part of the exhibition was devoted to textiles and textile designs, again divided into thematic groups. Stripes, squares, rectangles, and free-form designs showed her compositional approach to fabrics, while other sections, for instance jacqards, emphasized Stölzl’s complete technical understanding of weaving structures. Of course such a division was arbitrary since in the hands of a talent like Stölzl all these areas overlap. She was a pioneer in recognizing the artistic potential of jacquard weaving, a medium that uses machine rather than hand looms, and until then had been associated with mass production only. Today designers are rediscovering the possibilities of jacquard weaving, overcoming technical hurdles through advanced electronic technology, none of which was available to Stölzl. Yet her jacquards, testimony to her mastery of a complicated system of knowledge, are also artistic statements of unprecedented beauty.

By its very nature, an exhibition is a fleeting occurrence. (This one appeared at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, August 20,1997-January 4,1998; the Städtische Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, January 18-March 8,1998; and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, March 20-May 17,1998.) The accompanying catalogue, here under review, the definitive work on Stölzl thus far, is a scholarly compilation of individual essays. Edited and with contributions by the curator of the exhibition, Ingrid Radewaldt, it illuminates every facet of Stölzl’s life and work. Two biographies, one comprehensive, the other a chronological overview, benefited from the collaboration of Stölzl’s daughters, Yael Aloni and Monika Stadler, who also provided previously unpublished material. Ingrid Radewaldt’s descriptions of Stölzl’s work are informed by her thorough knowledge of the subject and include trenchant technical and visual analysis. Anja Baumhoff’s essay, “Equality, Tolerance or Exclusion ? Bauhaus Women in the Weimar Republic,” provides new insight into the institution in which, despite egalitarian claims, “the climate ….. was not hospitable, and very few women were able to attend classes of their choice without enrolling in the Weaving Workshop.” A refreshing relief from the iconic photographs at the Bauhaus are a number of previously unpublished snapshots showing Gunta Stölzl as a woman, friend and mother. The color plates are lavish in number and of good quality, although inclusion of descriptions on the same page rather than in a separate section would have been helpful and would have enhanced appreciation of the work. This, however, is a minor criticism.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Dessau Bauhaus organized a well-attended symposium, which took place on October 9, 1997. Ingrid Radewaldt led an informative tour through the galleries, elucidating new Stölzl scholarship in situ. Three formal papers followed. In “Marianne Brandt and Gunta Stölzl: From Bauhaus into Life – Two Biographies – A Comparison,” Magdalena Droste not only explored the Bauhaus tenure of these two designers but investigated their careers once they had left it. Anja Baumhoff presented the catalogue essay mentioned above. Her thought-provoking, superbly researched contribution investigated the Frauenfrage within its social and historical context. Baumhoff contended that it was precisely the segregated nature of the Weaving Workshop that permitted Stölzl to rise to a leadership position, a position that would have certainly been denied her otherwise. In “Acceptance and Divergence: The Bauhaus Concept in American Textile Design,” this author followed Bauhaus émigrés to the New World, where two weavers disseminated the tenets of the Weaving Workshop. Marli Ehrman at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Anni Albers at Black Mountain College. Both were exceptional teachers who passed on Bauhaus ideals to a new generation of American textile designers. In addition, Anni Albers’s articles and books challenged the historically anonymous status of the textile arts and placed them alongside other branches of design.

As it should have, the Gunta Stölzl retrospective testified first and foremost to the multifaceted talent of the innovative designer and gifted artist. But it did more. It paid tribute to Stölzl’s determination to succeed in an institution with a clear double standard and to the tenacity of women trying to forge careers in uncharted territory. Moreover, it established that Stölzl perfectly realized the goal of the Bauhaus, to unify art and technology.

History as a living entity, far from being closed, is always in flux, ready to be reinterpreted by a new generation of scholars. If in its own time the school failed to credit this designer, the present-day Bauhaus redressed the situation. The exhibition, the catalogue, and the symposium cemented a deservedly high appraisal of Stölzl’s role in contributing to the prosperity and lasting legacy of the Bauhaus.

Sigrid Wortmann Weltge
Professor, History of Art and Design
Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science

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i - “The strongest design expression of the new era is evident in the textiles, in those weavings about which Rudolf von Delius says: ‘We feel in Dessau the splendid energy of a way that leads into the future’ “; Günther von Bechmann, “Das Bauhaus in Dessau: Die Arbeit,” Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte 2, No.7 (1927): n.p.
ii - Ingrid Radewaldt, “Bauhaustextilien 1919-1933” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1986).
iii - All translations here are by the reviewer.
iv - Sigrid Wortmann Weltge, Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop (London, 1993).
v - The Bauhaus referred to the problem of too many women as, literally, the “woman question